"We call ourselves Runners. We exist on the edge, between the gloss and the reality - The Mirror's Edge. We keep out of trouble, out of sight. And the cops don't bother us. Runners see the City in a different way. We see the flow. Rooftops become pathways and conduits, possibilities, and routes of escape. The flow, is what keeps us running. What keeps us alive."

— Faith Connors

Mirror's Edge is a first-person action video game by DICE (Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment), set in a big, shiny city in a conformist police-state. You are cast as Faith, an illegal courier or "runner", whose job it is to hand-deliver messages and data across rooftops and skyways to avoid ubiquitous government monitoring of movement and communications.

The story follows Faith in her struggle to free her sister, who has been framed for the murder of the opposition candidate for Mayor of the city. While running her clients' illegal messages, she gets caught up in a series of events which lead to her being ruthlessly pursued by the totalitarian government herself. Mercury, Faith's trainer and mentor, acts as her guide, helping her outwit, outrun, and overcome the sinister agents out to eliminate her.

While the game is a first person shooter, guns are completely optionalnote There's even an achievement for not using one in the entire game. Instead, Faith uses parkour to traverse rooftops and evade enemies. The rooftops turned into large puzzle pieces as players found their way to point B. The game also had an interesting art direction: the city was almost entirely sterile white save some sparse colors here and there. Items and places would turn red to point players in the right direction.

An iPhone/iPad prequel was released in 2010. The gameplay was changed to a 2D Canabalt-style platformer, and the plot involves Mayor Callaghan's attempt to turn the public against the police so shenote She was male in the original game can replace them with her private military, something that was only hinted at in the original game.

This game provides examples of:

Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The storm-drain level, though it's justified as a storm drain designed to deal with tsunami flooding, possibly modelled on the G-Cans Project located just outside of Saitama, Japan.

Action-Based Mission: Usually the best strategy with enemies is just to run away from them, but there are a handful of places (such as the police ambush in the chapter "Heat") in which the player is forced to engage them directly.

Action Girl: Faith, but most of the main girls are as well, are capable of fighting security guards and roofhopinh.

Lampshaded on the penultimate level, when a voice overheard when moving noisily through the vents says, "Jesus, the rats are getting huge!". This comment is possibly lampshaded when one takes the below-mentioned Easter Egg into account.

All There in the Manual: Little about the city, the Runners, and Faith is explained in the game. More information can be found from the trailers and press coverage about it, and a tie-in comic written by the game's writer Rhianna Pratchett provides some background details.

Anyone Can Die: Among the many casualties, Merc, Jacknife, and possibly Miller stand out.

Artificial Stupidity: You can pretty easily shake off Pursuit Cops in the first encounter by sitting on a high spot and watching them run in impractical paths as they try to get you.

Awesome, but Impractical: Yes, if you were a suicidal adrenaline junkie, you too could learn to do almost everything that Faith does. You'd also learn why Jackie Chan stopped doing as many movies as he used to. Running along perpendicular walls works with the proper shoes and circumstances, as shown here. It takes a lot of training, but we can assume that Faith has completed that training. There is also a point in the game where she jumps off an eighty foot building and lands on her feet to escape from the "anti-runners". Ouch. On that note, we can easily conclude that well over half the "runners" ended up killing themselves with these stunts fairly quickly.

Bag of Spilling: When you die, any guns you picked up along the way will not respawn with you, so if you, for example, attempt to sneak a handgun through an entire level just to see if it's possible to just shoot the final boss, but miscalculate a single jump, well...

Benevolent Architecture: The city seems very well supplied with convenient cables and pipes running between rooftops. Especially for a city which seems to consider traçeurs its Public Enemy Number One. On the other hand, almost every building has roof-mounted fences, often electrified or topped with razorwire.

Big Bad Friend: The Parkour Assassin turns out to be Faith's best friend Celeste, who realizes the Runners are about to be exterminated, and agrees to help the bad guys to save her own sorry ass.

Big Brother Is Watching: Although he's kind of a slacker, given the overall efficiency (or apparent lack thereof) of his police state, it's that he's watching but may or may care what he sees.

Bittersweet Ending: Faith successfully rescues her sister and kills the man responsible for Pope's murder, but the Big Bad is nowhere to be seen, and they are both fugitives wanted for multiple murders. Her best friend has betrayed her, killing her beloved mentor and training the brutal police forces to kill all Runners. However, she was able to shut down the City's Sinister Surveillance, at least temporarily, and that's what Runners do in a sense - enable the Resistance to plan in privacy. This battle has been won, and the war continues..

Book Ends: The prologue and the final level both end with Faith jumping onto a helicopter.

Boring, but Practical: Despite the game's emphasis on melee combat and running, you might find that it's easier and safer to handle attacking cops or PK elites by knocking out one, taking his gun, and using that gun to shoot all the others.

Brick Joke: A rather sad one. An office worker from PK decides that their project to eliminate runners, the horrible working conditions, among other controversial things such as "interrogating co-workers", isn't worth it and sends a mail that he's quitting. This is detailed in his personal diary and rant can be read on his computer. The file containing said rant is found open on his computer when you get to the PK facility. When you go through the depths of the facility, you find a corridor filled with windows leading to interrogation rooms. An office worker is in one of them. Beaten and bloody.

Bullet Time: "Reaction Time". For when precision maneuvering is a matter of life and death, accept no substitutes.

Camera Screw: The player's camera is permanently fixed to Faith's eyes. Keep in mind Faith has to rapidly twist in midair to wall-jump...

Climactic Elevator Ride: Reaching the final level's objective requires an especially long elevator ride. It shows how high the Shard rises beyond the rest of the city's skyline, where the player has been running for the entire game.

Climax Boss: Faith's rooftop chase and kung-fu duel with the Parkour Killer. Hunting down and taking out a Runner gang leader as an attack helicopter stalks Faith in the IOS prequel.

Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Faith has been running for so long she instinctively sees useful terrain as bright red, and even if you turn this feature off some elements of the architecture remain easily identifiable thanks to their color schemes (bright red doors and blue walkways).

Conveniently Empty Building: The game takes place in the height of summer, so it's not immediately apparent that many of the levels take place during very early morning or late evening when most people would still be sleeping or have finished work several hours ago. The mall is closed for some reasons (though there are commercials in the game claiming it's open 24/7) and another level is a construction site. However, it's all deliberate, as the complete desolation in the middle of a major city is a large part of the game's dystopian theme.

Certain malls and most stores close down on Sundays, especially in Sweden and it's Scandinavia sister countries. On the other hand, it could be that the store closed on a unmentioned holiday, in which most Scandinavia stores and malls close down.

Corrupt Politician: The opening narration tells us that the political elite are corrupt. The ending implies it's not that bad, but there's at least one man out there willing to murder opponents.

Courier: The runners' jobs is to deliver physical information so it can't be tracked by The City of Glass' government.

Cowboy Cop: To the city police, it seems like the standard procedure to arrest a Runner can be boiled down to "fill the fucker with lead until they stop running. Then Double Tap". Hell, it's not even unusual to have them shoot at you with the heavy artillerybefore they actually order you to surrender ! Keep in mind that, in a Pacifist Run, Faith actually does nothing but run away from them and won't even carry a weapon, meaning that there is absolutely no reason for them to use deadly force against her. Then again, the city IS a totalitarian state, so abusive police forces are part of the bunch (even if breaking out the attack helicopters and armored SWAT teams for one unarmed woman running around the rooftops still sounds a bit much). However, turns out you're never facing actual cops, but Pirandello-Kruger mercenaries, trying to defend a conspiracy to replace the police with their own private force.

Crapsaccharine World: The city seems like a pretty nice place to live for an oppressive police state; it's a clean, sunny place where the people are healthy and the economy seems to be in good shape, which begs the question just what the deal is. Then again, the Cowboy Cop entry may be a good indicator there is indeed something very, very wrong with that place...

Cutscene Boss: Faith's "fight" with the minor villain Ropeburn consists of a cutscene and one quick time event before he's shot by one of your Evil Counterparts.

Cutscene Power to the Max: Averted. Everything Faith does in the 3D cutscenes can be executed with precisely timed inputs (except the hugs). In the opening, for example, Faith does a wall run, turns, triggers reaction time, then jumps onto the head of a crane. The only thing keeping players from doing it is a shortage of cranes (initially, anyway).

An interview with the developers revealed that the intro sequence didn't just use a series of the available animations - it was actually a recording of that section played by one of the devs! The concept was to show players what they would be able to do later in the game.

Played straight in one of the animated cut-scenes where Faith is surrounded by several armed Pirandello Krueger mercs. She drops down and she is surrounded by heavily armed mercs and they are all within close quarters. Faith all of the sudden goes Rambo and takes out all of them with melee combat as if she was this one woman army. In the game, you can be surrounded by them, but don't expect to fight out of them like in the cut-scene or expect to do so unscathed.The whole purpose of combat in this game is to fight in order to run away.

Disarm-counters instantly take down an enemy, and give you a free weapon, but you need to be in melee range (which means rushing at some one who is shooting at you), and you need to have very precise timing. Enemy melee attacks do a lot of damage, too, so if you fail to grab once, you might not get a second chance.

The Wall-Run Kick spins an enemy around, leaving them vulnerable to disarm attacks. Good luck getting an enemy into position to do that.

It's possible, with a lot of practice to become a Parkour Kungfu Master and kick the shit out of cops while looking incredibly badass.

Diegetic Interface: In that there is no interface- you have no health bar, ammo counter, Reaction Time meter, or anything. For instance, to find out where you need to go in a level, you press a button and Faith automatically looks right at it.

Does Not Like Guns: Faith, and if you never use any of the guns that are dropped, you earn an Achievement/Trophy.

To add unto Faith's perception of not liking guns, you get a different radio-report playing in the credits, detailing that most PKs and officers have been hurt and not killed.

In the reboot, Faith cannot hold guns period. It is not a option.

Do Not Drop Your Weapon: Enemies only drop their guns when they die, and Faith's disarm moves are all one-hit knockouts.

Easter Egg: Towards the end of the penultimate chapter ("Kate"), after correctly sniping the convoy's engine, quickly look up and snipe the middle dot on an orange sign showing nine dots. Quickly zoom out, and a giant rat, about the size of a car, will dart down the street. Click here to watch it, if you're curious.

A newscrawl in one of the elevator reports on the ongoing war in Sedaristan from Battlefield: Bad Company, another game by DICE.

Edge Gravity: While it only appears in a few places, this is one of the many nearly invisible Anti-Frustration Features. Getting too close to an edge and stopping will have Faith lose her balance, quickly regaining it and repositioning herself a little more from the edge.

Elite Mook: The Pursuit Cops can do a lot of the same parkour moves Faith can, so outrunning them can be challenging. In addition, they're immune to all melee attacks note It is in fact possible to defeat Pursuit Cops with hand-to-hand combat, it just takes several well-timed hits. If you haven't spent a lot of time fighting, and don't know how the PCs telegraph their attacks, you're in for a walloping. (except the Wall Run Kick, which allows you to take them out with one of Faith's disarming grabs), making it nigh-suicidal to attack them head-on. Merc will advise you to flee whenever you encounter one.

Escape Sequence: As you might guess, a game about running is full of these. On many occasions, you might find that luck, skill, and free use of guns allows you to fight your way past enemies you're supposed to flee from, but that won't fly when they break out the helicopters.

Everything Is an iPod in the Future: While all weapons and electronic devices seen on desks in the offices are black, the entire rest of the game world follows the iPod design concept.

Evil Counterpart: Two, actually. There's Celeste, the Parkour Assassin pursued by Faith through much of the game, and Jacknife, the retired Runner who takes responsibility for the entire evil plot in the final showdown, despite being just The Dragon to the (never seen) Big Bad.

Executive Suite Fight: Averted, Faith makes her way, and avoids the police, through several office buildings throughout the game.

Exploding Barrels: Played straight. Faith is usually unarmed, but her opponents can set them off for extra damage if she is near them. In a cutscene, Faith takes a gun from Celeste and kills a bunch of baddies by exploding a barrel.

Flipping the Bird: The "Sweet Goodbye" achievement. This is achieved by jumping forward, doing a 180 degree turn while in the air and then pressing the attack button in quick succession. This will make Faith flash a V-sign while falling backwards (this is the equivalent of flipping the bird in Britain, Ireland, and New Zealand).

Follow the Leader: This game inspired First Person Shooters to emphasize movement. Games like Brink and the sequel to Prey (2006) quickly referenced this game as inspiration.

Battlefield 3, also by DICE Studios also takes a very minor inspiration from this game by introducing similar movements for jumping over obstacles. Dying Light, contrary to what the developer says, also took cues from Mirror's Edge as well.

Follow the Plotted Line: Only a few missions actually show you the destination early on. Having lived in the city all her life, as well as being used to rooftop navigation, it's generally assumed that Faith knows her way around the city.

Notice the computer screens when Faith finds the information about Project Icarus. All the runners have their information filled in or marked as "unknown" - except for Celeste, whose info is marked as being "Classified".

Also, when Merc says "Who knows who [Jacknife]'s working for now", the elevator Faith's in is showing advertisements for Callaghan, Pirandello Kruger, and both Callaghan and Pirandello Kruger.

Fragile Speedster: Faith simply can't take on more than one or two Blues head on before getting shot to hell. This is not a problem since she can frequently zoom right past them. If you compare speed runs on YouTube, you'll find runs where some enemies fail to appear entirely - normally they are set to intercept Faith, but the player is so far ahead that they can only break down the door and yell "Freeze!" at an empty room. Buh-bye!

Frame-Up: The event that begins the action. Kate, Faith's sister, is framed for the murder of Pope, the only hope the city has of getting better.

The heavy presence of cameras is focused on as one of the city's invasions of privacy, but there are no consequences for running right past one and at no point are they treated like something that needs to be avoided.

Falling more than a certain distance will kill Faith instantly, except for predetermined cutscenes (also an example of Cutscene Power to the Max).

Gender Bender: The original mentions Callaghan as a male exactly once in the entire game. The iOS version mentions her as a female several times.

Genericist Government: The City of Glass is implied to have a representative democracy, after all, Pope was preparing for an election, but little else is stated about the government's style and function other than the oppressive/privacy invading stuff.

The Ghost: Drake, who is apparently an operator working with Merc and the runners, comes up in conversation several times, but is only seen once as a picture on a computer screen.

Averted on a particular door that does have the correct Japanese "立入禁止", "Entry Forbidden". Everything else is gibberish, though.

While in-game Chinese is correct (here the Traditional variant is used), translation at times seems to be somewhat lazy, with an omnipresent "非請莫入"(basically "no admittance without invitation/authorization") standing in for more detailed notifications, such as "Maintenance area".

The part where Faith slides down the sloped edge of a skyscraper to escape an armed helicopter is very reminiscent of Jackie Chan's famous stunt in Who Am I?.

Faith scrambling up, along then off a crane doesn't recall a certain scene in a movie perhaps? No? Here's a hint.

Hyperspace Arsenal: Very much averted. Carrying weapons reduces Faith's speed and agility, so while she can disarm enemy mooks and use their guns against them, she must usually discard them immediately; how can you shimmy up a pipe while carrying a 50. caliber sniper rifle?

The exception is the pistol and the machine pistol, which are both small enough that Faith can carry them without slowing down a bit. Unfortunately, they also have the smallest ammo clips out of any weapon in the game (except the shotgun, but that's another story entirely).

If I Wanted You Dead...: Jackknife says this when Faith accuses him of being the mysterious assassin. He's not, but he did hire the assassin.

The entire game is based around the premise that a police state has police who can't reliably hit moving objects, even with fully automatic weapons. Believe it or not, this is Truth in Television. Most people (including a number of experienced cops) sincerely believe that More Dakka will instantly reduce targets to hamburger. Inexperienced and/or overconfident law enforcement officers regularly empty their badge-granted leadspitters at unarmored targets at less than five meters, and don't put a scratch on them because they forget to aim. Burning off too much ammo at once blows accuracy to hell. Also, Police forces that rely too heavily on intimidation never really get enough weapons practice. Add all that up, then order the poor, doomed mooks to hunt down a human hamster. Hilarity Ensues.

Averted when playing on Hard difficulty. Can you say Oh, Crap!, Runner? The first shot by any mook almost always misses, but lets them sight in on you. Every shot after that can be expected to hit unless you take cover - real cover. This makes various sequences very difficult due to not being able to disarm or defeat mooks.

Played straight in a cutscene, where a whole group of police shoot at Faith and Celeste (neither of whom has any sort of cover) for several seconds without hitting.

Enforced in the reboot. As long as Faith is not still, bullets will miss.

Averted, since the game is mostly played atop skyscrapers, in that while Faith can jump over fences and most other obstacles, falling off the edge means instant death. That last part is Truth in Television, by the way.

There are spots where an obviously non-fatal drop will still cause death. Example.

It's really useful when you have a Sniper Rifle too; not only do you sensibly have the laser switched off, but you can use their beams to trace up to them with the scope. It even produces a handy little dot if they're behind cover!

Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When Faith is in an elevator, the TV screen on the elevator flashes various messages about the state of the city. One message outlines tips for determining if someone you know is secretly a Runner, and one of the tips is "A fondness for the color red", the dominant color of the game's "Runner Vision".

Light Is Not Good: Everything in The City of Glass is perfectly clean and shining white, and there is never a single wisp of cloud on the perfectly blue sky. Yet it all feels very sterile and there's almost no sign of actual life, except for lots of construction sites and hordes of police chasing after you. It makes the entire place actually a bit creepy, or at least unnerving.

Made of Iron: Faith can take a sniper bullet in the back while wearing only a tank top, and it will slow her down a little. She also drops a respectable distance through a glass ceiling and lands in the glass, yet is able to get up and keep running like nothing happened.

Magnet Hands: Averted. Faith cannot perform delicate maneuvers, or even run quickly when carrying most weapons. She can stuff a single pistol or SMG in her trousers, but that is it.

Man in White: Lieutenant Miller, with white hair and mustache to match. He's a cop, after all. He's actually an ally for basically all of the game.

Never Found the Body: Celeste is not seen after Faith blows up a gas can between them and some incoming Blues after their final showdown. However, it is implied that Faith doesn't think Celeste is dead, but rather does not want to deal with her anymore due to how upset she is.

Noodle Incident: At the beginning of the tutorial, Merc mentions that Faith was taken out of action for a while due to an unspecified injury she sustained.

Non Standard Game Over: You'll get one if you fail to shoot the engine of the police truck carrying Faith's sister to jail.

Notice This: Faith's "Runner Vision" highlights certain objects along her route in bright red, showing the player which way to go, though it doesn't always show the best route. You can turn it off from the options menu. It is forced off on Hard difficulty, which would be unbearable if it didn't require you to have cleared the game to play on Hard.

Not the Fall That Kills You: Averted. You can roll or crouch to avoid damage from sensible jumps, but more than that and you're going splat, and you get a couple of seconds to meditate on your failure.

Offscreen Villainy: Most of the crimes committed by the people in charge of the city don't happen onscreen in the present day.

Pacifist Run: The only person Faith must kill is her Evil Counterpart, which she does automatically by jumping from the roof of the hundred-and-ten-story Shard onto a helicopter, booting him right out the other side in the process. Of course he fires his SMG all the way down and kills the rotors, meaning Faith and Kate are stuck on a falling helicopter... In fact, you earn a special achievement, "Test of Faith", if you complete the game without shooting anyone with a firearm (except the convoy). Funnily enough, the achievement is strictly for not shooting anyone; you can throw Blues into the path of an oncoming train or off skyscrapers and still be considered a pacifist. However, if you don't shoot anyone, then you will have to deal with at least a couple of enemies in other ways, if only because even Faith isn't fast enough to dodge a heavy machine gunner camped right by the door she needs to use.

Le Parkour: The entire premise of the game is running and jumping between buildings, cables, etc. Actually, it's an unbelievably over-the-top and virtually suicidal form of parkour.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Faith is supposed to be a courier, but only gets to deliver a single package before getting caught up in the storyline. It's explained in the tutorial that Faith was out of commission for a while due to a Noodle Incident injury and the story begins a bit after she recovers. Her sister is more important than her job.

Platform Game: The developer was trying to innovate by making it first-person, though this led to several people, including Yahtzee, complaining that you wouldn't be able to see the character's feet before jumping. The game suffers from the lack of proprioception, the sense that lets you know where all the bits and pieces of your body are at any given moment, which is why you can touch your fingers to your nose with your eyes closed (unless you're drunk). It also suffers from the fact that your brain is constantly comparing the inputs from different senses. So when your eyes tell you you're running along a rooftop and doing flips, but your body tells you you're sitting perfectly still, the result is motion sickness. So it causes problems because of what it doesn't tell you, and because of what it does tell you.

Police State: The City of Glass is majorly totalitarian; monitoring everything and cracking down hard on anyone who tries to evade their sight.

Both the games visuals and plot place it firmly into the post-cyberpunk genre; very clean, very shinny, and also an oppressive police state where the heroes are the ones who can avoid them. At the same time, futuristic weapons or electronics are completely absent. The few times people do use computers, it's to read documents during cutscenes, and the most complex electronic devices the player uses are elevator buttons.

Averted in the reboot. Pure Cyberpunk with eye implants, vertibirds, drones, and electronic walls that can scan your ID with a touch.

The Precarious Ledge: Faith slows down long enough to creep across ledges on the rooftops, such as during the training sequence whilst following Celeste. These short sections come with Plummet Perspective too.

Press X to Not Die: When Ropeburn swings that pipe at you, grab it or he'll smack you one and throw you right off the building!

Pretentious Latin Motto: The real reason why Miller takes his sweet time to unlock the last elevator in the last level is to give you time to read the motto on the wall: "Finis Coronat Opus" (Lat. "the end crowns the work", a slightly more pretentious way to say "the end justifies the means").

Private Military Contractors: If you look closely, you'll notice the more heavily-armed "Blues" in the game wear black PK uniforms instead of the blue CPF uniforms worn by the city police. Faith herself somehow misses this little detail until a CPF character points it out to her in the very last level. Turns out they're all security forces of Pirandello/Kruger, a PMC that turns out to be one of your main enemies.

Punch-Clock Hero: Ropeburn was hired by Pope to protect him from the mayor's lackeys. Unfortunately, he was one of those lackeys.

Punch-Clock Villain: Celeste still hangs out with the other Runners and hints to them to give up that life, as her other job is training a new unit of mercenaries that will capture or eliminate all Runners in The City of Glass.

Racing Ghost: A transparent red one. Some gamers follow it at a reduced pace just to witness the coolness from a third-person perspective.

Real Is Brown: Gloriously averted, for once, with brightly colored buildings and clear blue skies. Although green is mostly absent to give a feeling of sterility. Even the plants are white.

Red Oni, Blue Oni:On a large scale, the City is divided between the Totalitarian Utilitarian government (which is associated with the color blue through their police force and Jackknife. The police force are even called "Blues" by runners) and the runners, the defiant, passionate young couriers who evade their control (who specifically associate with red via "runner vision" and their personal effects).

Reasonable Authority Figure: Lieutenant Miller recognizes that Kate, his co-worker, is being framed and is willing to work with her sister to clear her name, even if that sister happens to be a Runner.

Samus Is a Girl: The boss of Chapter 7 is Celeste, whose alter ego was presumed male. Hilariously, your first clue is when [[spoiler:she doesn't really react to your crotch-kicks. Another giveaway - when you hit her she grunts girlishly, and how many girls have you met so far in the game? Faith, Celeste, and Kate. Two of those are fairly unlikely. A third giveaway — and a pretty clever one at that — when you're escaping the mall and the Parkour Killer waits for Faith to catch up, she does Celeste's idle animation: that restless hop you first see in the tutorial.

Scenery Porn: The City of Glass looks amazing from the prospective of a runner.

Shining City: The City of Glass looks amazing but peel away the surface and it is pretty ugly.

Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: If Faith gets up in their faces, her opponents will attempt to club the She-Fu master with their weapon rather than shoot her. Then they wonder why she's holding it all of a sudden.

Steam vents are particularly irritating obstacles because they require you to stop and rotate the nearby valves for a couple of seconds. This is a game where even braking down reduces your success chances.

Take Our Word for It: It's a bit difficult to get across how the city's policies affect the average citizen in a video game focusing on an illegal courier. However, given that Faith and many others make a living they must have a sufficient customer base.

Tempting Fate: The final boss's taunt to Faith: "You can't live on the edge all your life, Faith. Sooner or later, you have to jump." And jump she does.

The Tetris Effect: You, too, will develop "Runner Vision". After completing this game, all pipes, ladders and cranes you see will be cherry-red, and you will find yourself plotting the best way to navigate them.

Third-Person Seductress: Averted in an admirable fashion. Faith is a truly attractive woman, but she is also just as slender and athletic as a marathon-running acrobat should be, and her practical tank-top, cargo-pants and jika-tabi shoes are clothes a traçeuse might actually wear. Stripperific, no. Cool, definitely. Of course, the game's also played from a first-person perspective, so Faith's appearance is only really apparent in the 2D animated cutscenes.

The creators cared so much about how they went out of their way to make her design attractive but not Stripperific, that when someone released a Photoshopped image, they expressed considerable disappointment that their athletic heroine had been transformed into "twelve-year-old with a boob job."

Throw-Away Guns: Faith throws away her gun whenever she runs out of ammo, and you cannot reload a gun at all. It's justified, since she can't carry extra bullets and the guns slow her down anyway.

Tightrope Walking: Faith can run on thin pipes and planks if need be. This can involve manual balance (not just keeping her upright by wiggling the stick or Sixaxis) such as when Faith had to run on a crane; at these times her survival is dependent on the skill of the player at keeping her feet centered, not just her center of gravity. In-game comments allude to the danger of this trope.

Time Trial: One mode of the game is completing a course in the fastest time possible. It goes with Something Completely Different as the place for the Time Trial DLC takes place in some rather abstract levels, specifically designed to have players go through trial and error for the fastest time.

Title Drop: In the intro movie: "We call ourselves Runners. We exist on the edge between the gloss and the reality; the Mirror's Edge." In this case, it seems to be not so much shoehorning the phrase in, but explaining it, which is kind of a nice change from the norm.

As said in Caring Potential, you have a few opportunities to throw enemies off of high places, if you're feeling sadistic. The most noticable option for it is when a shotgun-wielding PK comes out from a construction building as you parkour through it, your most likely reaction is to jumpkick him head-on.

You try keeping your cool instead of disarming an enemy and using his weapon to utterly slaughter his comrades after you are treated one time too many to the sight of Faith falling dead on her side with the screen blacking out to the sound of "Arrest the suspect !"

Voice with an Internet Connection: Mercury assists Faith with intel through a radio; the internet itself is monitored. Until he gets killed. Then Miller takes over during the final level.

Walk It Off: It's slightly disconcerting to have survived several bursts of automatic gunfire and recovered, only to corner the guy and get laid out by two consecutive Pistol Whippings.

Wall Jump: Faith is practically freaking Spider-Man. Just don't try to Wall Crawl. Show some respect for the laws of physics!

What Happened to the Mouse?: During that final confrontation, there are mooks shooting at you. After the confrontation—which does not involve fighting them, or leaving the area on a permanent basis—they are gone. We can assume that the mooks fled the scene when the chopper lost control. You wouldn't like to be on a roof when a chopper loses control and is about to crash into said building.

Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The City's location is ambiguous. Clocks throughout the game depict the letters "E.T.", as in "eastern time", which would make you think it's on the East Coast of North America. Not so fast though, because the city's coastline matches Seattle's, which is on the West Coast. Of course, it's likely not in North America since news stories reference the United States as a foreign country, and traffic is on the left side of the road. Then there's two official languages, English and Chinese. All of this adds up to confusing the hell out of anyone trying to figure out where the City is, and that's probably intentional.

Wilhelm Scream: Appears in the smart phone prequel. Kick a merc off a building and you'll hear it.

Window Pain: You want to hide behind glass in that building? Well, the enemies will shoot at you, and the glass will break.

A Winner Is You: After clearing the final level and saving Kate (again), they just hug without a word, the camera pans out to show most of the city, and the credits roll. The only epilogue we get is during the credits, in the form of a brief news soundclip suggesting that Faith and Kate have eluded the police once again, which is hardly a surprise given the many daring escapes Faith pulled off in the story.

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